As Seen in Vanity Fair's August 2006 Issue!
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As Seen in Time Magazine's September 11, 2006 Issue!
As Seen in Phoenix New Times' August 9, 2007 Issue!

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Confronting David Ray Griffin in Osaka

Note: This is a guest post from a JREF debunker who attended a DRG event in Osaka, Japan. As most of you probably know, Griffin generally does not allow himself to get in settings where he will be challenged by people who understand and can debunk the minutiae that the Troofers use to make their flimsy case. I think Mark (Gravy) Roberts, James B, and I would love to get a chance to debunk Griffin in person, but he's smart enough not to get into that situation. So big kudos to Adversity1, who lived the dream. Here's his report, verbatim:

Hey folks.

Went to the David Ray Griffin tour in Osaka today. Something like 50-60 people there. What was interesting here was that the event in Osaka was hosted by the 'people's newspaper', a new left newspaper that has been around since the 1960s. Because of this, the plain anti-semitism of the Tokyo conference could not be so easily put on display. In fact in the book sale area, there was typical anti-war literature and 'vanilla' 9/11 truth literature.

So yeah, I was invited to speak on stage after Griffin made his speech and critique him. Griffin was also critiqued by a left activist previously, which was rather brutal. He was repeatedly shown pictures of airplane parts in the Pentagon, to which he could only double down and claim that 'well if you're going to commit false flag terrorism, you would leave some evidence behind'. So yeah, that's his answer to the Pentagon stuff, that the government planted it. People in the audience were looking at each other like 'whaaaat?' It was awful. So I started yelling out 'what about the body parts??' To which Griffin said that he would get to later. Eventually he did, after skipping over it in one of his uselessly long monologues. His reasoning about all the body parts the coroner found? Well those appeared at the pathology center and there were [U]never any bodies from the plane found in the wreckage[/U]. To which I laughed out loud, quickly opened up my copy of Firefight, found the page where it mentioned BODIES STRAPPED TO SEATS and interrupted again. 'Um, just a brief correction to what you're saying there.' But no, Griffin wouldn't have it. He claimed he had to move on because there was no time. 'Yeah you want to move on because you're lying. SCUMBAG.' To which he had no reply and the whole auditorium got really quiet lol.

So the left activist had already pretty much torn the dude up when he got his chance to speak. He spent his time mostly on the 9/11 comission report, the chairman, Norman Mineta, timeline contradictions etc. I didn't think he was going to get into any real woo, but yeah he did. Claimed again no plane at the Pentagon, then brought up the voice synthesizers. I loled. I think he'd really lost people at this point.

Oh by the way he made his debut at the end of this speech as a Pearl Harbor conspiracy theorist, stating something like the President knew the attack was coming or something. Very political to do in a nationalist Japan where this sort of conspiracy theory is used by the right to imagine away their war of aggression. But this is David Ray Griffin, the most disgusting apologist I've ever personally witnessed.

After his presentation, which was quite accurately translated by Kikuchi Yumi, the so-called 'peace activist' who had invited Griffin to Japan. By the time that I was called up to stage to critique his arguments, however, she suddenly [B]refused to interpret[/B] for Griffin and I. She claimed that she had heard I spoke really good Japanese, so it shouldn't be a problem, and dashed off to the bathroom. Um, well yes I am a professional translator. But there is a huge difference in the field that I translate for (electronics) and the specialist terms that I would need to translate anything about the WTC collapses. Nevertheless, these were the circumstances given to me and I went ahead with my critique, in Japanese.

I opened with the statement that I do believe that there was something called the 9/11 truth movement, and that this included the 9/11 families who helped initiate the 9/11 commission report, writers like Lynn Spencer, Patrick Creed, Rick Newman and others. However, what we are dealing with here in Osaka today is not a truth movement. It does not seek out objective truth. Next, I decided to follow up on the question that Griffin had avoided earlier, pulling out my copy of Firefight and reading the passage on page 373 about not only airplane parts being found, but [B]bodies strapped to seats[/B]. After I read my question in Japanese, I said it to Griffin and he looked at me dumbfounded for like 10 seconds. There was laughter in the audience. It was a really odd moment. Um, so then he responded and said something about how well these are only the accounts of two people and how can you trust that, and if you were going to commit false flag terrorism then you would have to plant some evidence to make it look realistic. I think most people in the audience got the point that he was just ********ting. I was then asked to make all my criticisms and then Griffin would address them later. So I moved onto his point about the 'faked' calls to victims, and quoted from George Papcun, the creator of voice-morphing technology who states emphatically that what Griffin claims is simply not technically possible. Then I talked about how Michael Hess, one of the two witnesses to 'explosions' in WTC7, about whom Griffin had earlier claimed that along with Barry Jennings, 'these two men witnessed the event, and therefore there is no way that they can be lying', had clarified in the new version of the BBC's 'the Third Tower' that what he thought was an explosion was in fact the impact of the WTC tower on the south side of the building. Then I brought up the final statement of the 9/11 Family Steering Commitee which accepted the findings of the 9/11 commission, and then the Jersey Girl's acceptance of the building 7 NIST report (thanks JihadJane!). I believe these were the only points I was able to make in such a short amount of time due to the limits of my Japanese and the need to interpret everything back to Griffin. In response to all of my points, Griffin essentially waffled. He spent something like 5 minutes of his reply on completely random subject matter including claiming that the conspiracy that the truthers allege is equivocal to the 'government's allegations' of an Al Queda conspiracy (even though he refuses to put together a hypothesis of his own!). At least some people in the audience were annoyed by this obvious ********ting and one guy started cat-calling "HEY, you're repeating yourself!" in Japanese, which led to Griffin eventually trying to address my points. Re: Hess, well he's a friend of Giuliani's. Re: the Jersey Girls and the 9/11 Family Steering Committee documents, well one of the Jersey Girls endorsed my book. LOL

So that was about it...it was obvious by this point that even the activists with the 'people's newspaper' who had put the event on, just wanted to put an end to this event and move on. I could tell that at least some of them were by the end extremely critical of what they heard. A few came up to me shaking their heads and laughing afterwards, and those who were already critical felt clearly vindicated.

But before I left the stage, I had a present for Dr. Griffin. I had printed out all 300 pages of Ryan Mackey's critique of his work, gave a brief description of the paper plus an introduction to Ryan Mackey to all assembled before handing it over to a disgruntled Griffin.

With that, the 'people's newspaper' folks ended with a Chomsky quote against the conspiracy theory and closed the event. As people were walking out, I handed attendees copies of a review that a socialist newspaper had done of Hideji Okina's 'The Trap of Conspiracy Theories' which is a pretty concise statement of how these theories are linked to anti-semitism and irrational fear of authority (I should state for the record that I am on the radical left and as such completely opposed to anti-semitism/anti-Zionism). The reception of the article was awesome, people came up and thanked me directly, told me I had done a great job despite being forced to speak in Japanese and I had several longer conversations with people. One person even asked where to download the Mackey paper lol. I think the truth movement suffered a defeat here in Osaka and it's thanks to the (belated) critical inquiry of some of the 'people's newspaper' staff, Griffin and Kikuchi's own complete incompetence, and my limited contribution.

So after this disastrous performance, I went onto stage to confront Griffin one more time. I asked him about his personal correspondence with Hufschmid and Bollyn and other holocaust deniers. He claimed that he had taken Hufschmid's references out of the new edition of his book, but that Bollyn 'is different' and does not deny the holocaust. This is either willful ignorance or a blatant lie. He also mentioned that Hufschmid lives about a mile from him, and that he had been over to his house several times!! 'And he didn't mention anything to you about holocaust denial at those times??' 'No, no he didn't.' Wow. So they are closer than perhaps people here knew.

Anyways over the next week I'm going to try to get video of the event for people to see. I would also like to turn this into a post on Screw Loose Change if possible and call out Kikuchi Yumi for what she is, a smiling face knowingly making excuses for some of the worst reactionaries both abroad and at home.

Endnote from Pat: Great job, Adversity1!

Update from Pat: Jon Gold claims that the Jersey Girls (presumably minus Breitweiser), issued a cleverly worded endorsement of the NIST report on WTC-7 that really was them mocking the report, but unfortunately I cannot confirm this because the Zionist New World Order has blocked my access to 9-11 Flogger. This is important because Patty Casazza and Mindy Kleinberg are clearly the foremost experts in structural engineering in the world and if they're not on board with the NIST report, then it is clear that 9-11 was an inside job.